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Kuleshov Effect
Overview Based on Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov’s work, the Kuleshov effect demonstrates how the alterations of contextual framing can affect a viewer’s perception of visual expression. The term applies to both a filmmaker’s extensive control of how a film is experienced and the complicated factors that influence human perception. History Kuleshov first demonstrated this mental/film phenomenon in the 1910s and 1920s. It was Kuleshov’s short film of Ivan Mosjoukine—a montage of expressional closeups of Mosjoukine with splices of different scenes, including a plate of soup, a girl’s funeral, and a woman—that brought the term to the attention of other filmmakers and psychologists. Audiences viewed “the heavy pensiveness of (Mosjoukine’s) mood over the forgotten soup, (and) were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead child, and noted the lust with which he observed the woman,” even though each shot of Mosjoukine’s face was exactly the same (Wang). The short film thus demonstrated “the importance of editing techniques to guide the audiences' perceptions and enhance the impact of a scene” (Mobbs, 95). Since the term’s introduction, psychologists have examined the theory in the context of mental functioning and perception. For example, Dean Mobbs and a team of other researchers studied the theory and published their findings in "The Kuleshov Effect: The Influence Of Contextual Framing On Emotional Attributions." Example One example of this can be applied to how defendants in criminal cases perform in front of the jury. In some cases, such as Michael Peterson’s murder case documented in Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s “The Starcase,” the defendant is advised to act emotion-less and silent before the jury. This allows both the defense’s and prosecution’s statements to provided context to the defendant’s behavior. Another example is the scene from the Silence of the Lambs, where parallel editing is used to convey two alternative scenes happening at the same time but in different locations. The scene from the movie goes back and forth from the FBI closing in on a house and inside shots of a house with Jame Gumb. These two different makes viewers perception of what is going on complex. Recreating the Effect The Society for Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Texas conducted an experiment to find out just how effective the Kuleshov effect can be on an audience. They recreated the experiment with four different shots. Separate shots included an actor's face, a bowl of soup, a child playing, and a woman in a coffin. They tried to get a group that did not know about the Kuleshov effect in order to get unbiased results. The film wasn't shown to participants as a montage, but rather three different sequences for the actor's face cutting to each different shot. When just shown the actor's face, 88% of people said the actor's expression was just neutral. When watching the soup sequence, this number decreased to 68%, and during both the child and coffin sequence 61% of the audience thought the face was neutral. However, some limitations of this experiment are made apparent when Kuleshov may have been a well known filmmaker of his time. There may have been biases on the actor in this experiment. The audience reaction could change if it's a random actor, or if it's a neutral face of Meryl Streep or Johnny Depp, just someone that is more well known in the acting field. In the end, this experiment's goal was to quantify the effectiveness of the Kuleshov effect and to find a way to measure it in a nonbiased space. Resources and further reading ' # Kuleshov, Lev Vladimirovich. Kuleshov on film: writings. Univ of California Press, 1974. A look into some of the key contributions that Lev Kuleshov has made. A translation and overview of Kuleshov’s various writings about film and cinema. # Russell, Michael. "The Kuleshov Effect and the Death of the Auteur." FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts. No. 01. 2005. A different take on the Kuleshov Effect and how it can still affect modern cinema. # Wallbott, H. G. (1988). In and out of context: Influences of facial expression and context information on emotion attributions. British Journal of Social Psychology, 27, 357-369. A study on how facial expressions and contextual information can affect one’s perception of a film scene; factors that are related to the Kuleshov effect. # "The Kuleshov Effect." The Kuleshov Effect. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Dec. 2014. A simplified overview of the Kuleshov Effect. # Bordwell, David. "What Happens between Shots Happens between Your Ears." Observations on Film Art. N.p., 4 Feb. 2008. Web. 14 Dec. 2014. A website that helps you understand the Kuleshov effect with several visual examples. # Prince, Stephen. "The Kuleshov Effect: Recreating the Classic Experiment." ''Cinema Journal 31.2 (1992): 59. University of Texas, 2010. Web. 15 Dec. 2014. '''Keywords Audience , media , sound engineering, parallel editing Citations Mobbs, Dean, et al. "The Kuleshov Effect: The Influence Of Contextual Framing On Emotional Attributions." Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience 1.2 (2006): 95-106. Academic Search Complete. Web. 21 Nov. 2014. Wang, Yifan., Du, Chenxi. and Wang, Xiaomiao. "The Magic of Montage" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Oklahoma Research Day, Cameron University, Lawton, OK, Nov 04, 2011 . 2014-09-13 The Silence of the Lambs. Dir. Jonathan Demme. 1990. Category:Keyword